US State Dept. Loses Anti-Terrorist Program Laptops

Stony Stevenson writes "It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. Internal auditors found that the department lost track of $30 million worth of computer equipment, 'the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent,' were laptops, according to one official. Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray — not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests. They're obviously not very good at maths."

Blame Iran

They're using them and a bunch of XBoxes to create a supercomputer possible of calculating what wacky thing the president is going to do next.

Re:Blame Iran

They're using them and a bunch of XBoxes to create a supercomputer possible of calculating what wacky thing the president is going to do next.

I think the word is spelled "stuporcomputer"

Why don't they handcuff the laptops to the users?

Seems like that is the most effective thing right now.

eBay?

I would give eBay a try to find them out!

Math issues resolved

Obviously the problem is in assuming that all of the laptops were "worth" the same. Actually, there were 999 laptops that the government paid about $1,000 each for, which had important documents containing SSNs, medical and employment records, etc of every single person in the united states who was not a member of the Department of Homeland Security, as well as various secret anti-terrorist initiatives, identities of government moles working within terrorist groups and so on, totaling a value of about $999,000.

The other $29,001,000 is due to the loss of one laptop containing the SSN and medical records of the director of the Department of Homeland Security.

Clearly there's only one thing left to do...

Call in Jack Bauer, I'm sure he'll have them back within 24 hours.

Filed away accidentally?

Were they MacBook Airs? Perhaps they're stuck inside some manila envelopes.

$3000 for a laptop??

A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane! No (non-gaming) laptop costs that much unless you're just trying to burn money. This further reduces my faith in the abilities of the national government (and makes me feel really great about my taxes). =/

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

I presume that price includes software, created by government contractors at high price for a specific purpose, divided amongst the few thousand computers that have it installed.

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

I presume that price includes software, created by government contractors at high price for a specific purpose, divided amongst the few thousand computers that have it installed.

Software would be a part of the purchase price, but not the calculation of the value of the lost property.

After all, software is licensed not bought. When a computer gets lost, they still have the license, right? It's not like they have repurchase the same software for the replacement computers.

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

It's not like they have repurchase the same software for the replacement computers.

Haven't dealt with Microsoft lately, have we?

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

This further reduces my faith in the abilities of the national government (and makes me feel really great about my taxes). =/

If you got all of your money by stealing it from people, I don't think you would care too much about wasting some of that money.
In government, where is the incentive to not waste money?

MOD PARENT UP

I was about to reply with the same thing. This is yet another example of why it is ridiculous to say it is better to "just let the government handle it". Not only is there no incentive to be cost-effective, secure, OR efficient, but the exact opposite becomes the case - government employees get their jobs through friends and family, ie cronyism, so because they did not need to prove their competence to get their jobs, there is also no incentive for them to be competent in their positions.

Broken Window Fallacy

The parable of the broken window [wikipedia.org] might be of interest to you as to why this is a bad idea.

You are saying "it is ok to steal from people if that money is going to be used to buy other things", right?

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

Ya but we feel confident that they can do a good job with health care!!

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

As a scientist working for a US-government research lab, these stories make me die a bit inside.

Where I work, we are very budget conscious. We could never justify spending $3000 on laptops. In fact we have to make a very solid case before we can get our desktops upgraded to even modern commodity levels (despite the fact that, as you might guess, we do plenty of work that pushes a desktop machine to its limits). Moreover, we have a very strict inventory system. All equipment (including computers) is accounted for, and has to be barcode-scanned annually to make sure it's still accounted for. Even computers that are so old no one would want them are still meticulously tracked.

I always assumed that this was standard for government agencies... but I guess some agencies are able to bend and break these rules more wantonly than others. It makes me sad to think of the wastage in one branch when we are diligently following the rules, and barely scraping by, in another...

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane! No (non-gaming) laptop costs that much unless you're just trying to burn money.

Ok, buy a laptop. Put the most popular business OS on it. Put the most popular business office suite on it. Put "standard" software on it, Acrobat, virus scanner, CALs for email, SQL, and such. Now look at the cost. Having bought a number of computers for companies, the hardware costs $500-$1000 for the desktop, and $2000+ after all the software. And yes, they essentially throw out all the licenses when they get rid of the computer, but by then the software is usally obsolete as well. Not to mention that a laptop order here is usually for someone "special" with special needs. With the cost of the one laptop was an extra battery, an extra charger, a monitor, a stand, a dock, a case, a mouse, a keyboard (invariably wireless) and sometimes even things like printers. The "laptop" was half accessories or more.

So when they "cost" $3000, that's probably not the cost of the hardware laptop only, but includes other expenses.

Re:$3000 for a laptop??

Actually these were special DHS laptops with the ultimate security feature:
An ultraslick teflon outer coating to prevent the employees from writing down their automatically generated 16 letter+capital+number+special changing once a month passwords on sticky notes and glue them to the notebook.

Things to keep in mind...

1) They've only done one pass of their inventory. Once this has become public, the supervisors will get pushed on from their bosses to make sure that more equipment is accounted for in the second and third passes.

2) The reason that many of these laptops are listed as worth ~$3,000 is probably that some of them are 10+ years old (when laptops were really really expensive). That also explains why some of them can't be found; they're shoved in the back of filing cabinets or in the bottom of desk-drawers because they haven't been used in years and years. Their practical value is probably nothing, but -- on paper -- they're worth thousands because that's what they were bought for all those years ago...

Papertrails

I haven't worked for the government ever asides from working as an intern for a local County government's IT department, so I really don't know the answer to this.

What in the world happens with these things as far as papertrails go? This question comes to mind every time they "lose" weapons or laptops. Isn't there anyone that has their name on these items as being responsible? Surely either the shipping departments, the departments that they were assigned to, or the people that they were assigned to could be held responsible right?

I imagine for example that in moving of large arms shipments around the Middle East for our troops that there's someone always in charge of the stuff, or that last touched it. Wouldn't a great place to start (and place the blame) be the last person that signed off on something like this? In anything bigger than a really tiny company, there should be very clear paper trails like this right?

Doesn't someone have to answer? Isn't it the auditors job to know who last touched them?

Government accounting

Cost of laptop: $3000

Cost of personnel to procure it, insurance, shipping, paperwork, legislation, research, etc on a per-item basis: $8000

Total cost in taxes, per laptop, to you: $11000

Cost of laptop, out of back of 10-year-old SUV with motor running, on street, from some guy named Joey with methamphetamine acne: $400

Re:Government accounting

They are obviously ordering the laptops from the wrong vendor.

We need new Math Textbooks

They're obviously not very good at maths

9/11 changed everything... even multiplication.

They were found yesterday

At least according to this website: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002717866 [cqpolitics.com]

Re:$3000?

Aren't you glad we're supporting small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned businesses at the cost of your (and my) tax dollars?

Yep sounds like my old company of 20 people doing contracts for the government. The President and VP co owned the company... guess who was the president: the minority woman. Guess who did most of the contact establishment, contract negotiation, and assembled the technical know how, and basically ran the company... the white bread male VP. She was useless, and started to get bitter when she began to realize this. Not saying this is a reflection of her nationality or sex, just that she was nothing more than a figurehead for the company so we could get more contracts.